the famous trout of Loch Leven.  They are also extremely game for their size; a half-pound trout fights like a pounder.  From thirty to forty fish in a day’s incessant angling is reckoned no bad basket.  In genial May weather, probably the trout average two to the pound, and a pounder or two may be in the dish.  But three to the pound is decidedly nearer the average, at least in April.  The flies commonly used are larger than what are employed in Loch Leven.  A teal wing and red body, a grouse hackle, and the prismatic Heckham Peckham are among the favourites; but it is said that flies no bigger than Tweed flies are occasionally successful.  In my own brief experience I have found the trout “dour,” occasionally they would rise freely for an hour at noon, or in the evening; but often one passed hours with scarcely a rising fish.  This may have been due to the bitterness of the weather, or to my own lack of skill.  Not that lochs generally require much artifice in the angler.  To sink the flies deep, and move them with short jerks, appears, now and then, to be efficacious.  There has been some controversy about Loch Awe trouting; this is as favourable a view of the sport as I can honestly give.  It is not excellent, but, thanks to the great beauty of the scenery, the many points of view on so large and indented a lake, the charm of the wood and wild flowers, Loch Awe is well worth a visit from persons who do not pitch their hopes too high.

Loch Awe would have contented me less had I been less fortunate in my boatman.  It is often said that tradition has died out in the Highlands; it is living yet.

After three days of north wind and failure, it occurred to me that my boatman might know the local folklore—­the fairy tales and traditions.  As a rule, tradition is a purely professional part of a guide’s stock-in-trade, but the angler who had my barque in his charge proved to be a fresh fountain of legend.  His own county is not Argyleshire, but Inverness, and we did not deal much in local myth.  True, he told me why Loch Awe ceased—­like the site of Sodom and Gomorrah—­to be a cultivated valley and became a lake, where the trout are small and, externally, green.

“Loch Awe was once a fertile valley, and it belonged to an old dame.  She was called Dame Cruachan, the same as the hill, and she lived high up on the hillside.  Now there was a well on the hillside, and she was always to cover up the well with a big stone before the sun set.  But one day she had been working in the valley and she was weary, and she sat down by the path on her way home and fell asleep.  And the sun had gone down before she reached the well, and in the night the water broke out and filled all the plain, and what was land is now water.”  This, then, was the origin of Loch Awe.  It is a little like the Australian account of the Deluge.  That calamity was produced by a man’s showing a woman the mystic turndun, a native sacred toy.  Instantly water broke out of the earth and drowned everybody.